People keep talking about how much Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” would cost.

Trillions and trillions. But that’s not the point. It’s all about power.

The self-described Democratic Socialist from New York, is, like her sponsor Sen. Bernie Sanders, a communist in sheep’s clothing.

According to SocialistWorker.org, “She was recruited to run by Brand New Congress, a political action committee founded by former Sanders staffers, and her campaign was shaped by it, as well as by the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America].”

Because she’s only 29, she doesn’t have the lengthy, radical record that 77-year-old Bernie compiled. But she’s the new face of the Democratic Party’s plunge into outright socialism. All six of the major announced contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have endorsed her sweeping “Green New Deal.” She’s also proclaimed that “I’m the boss” and warned that any Democrat members of Congress voting with Republicans will be put “on a list” for retaliation.

Socialism is a power trip. Its promises of guaranteed income equality, “free” medical care, “free college tuition,” state ownership of the means of production, confiscation of private property, central planning and a one-party system inevitably result in coercion and violence.

It took only two decades for Venezuela’s “Democratic Socialist” revolution, for example, to produce an impoverished communist police state run by Cuban security forces.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote that socialism was the last evolutionary step on the way to communism. Think of communism as socialism with guns and a gulag.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s green scheme is so grandiose that it would require massive government force. Are Americans really going to put up with the government outlawing cars, airplanes and gas-driven lawnmowers, along with their firearms? Will they accept confiscatory taxes to pay for “free” medical care, “free” child care, “free” college tuition and unlimited illegal immigration? Lots of eggs will have to be broken for this omelet.

Socialist revolutions – whether by National Socialism (Nazism) or communism – require violence because socialism violates the laws of nature and nature’s God – the sources of authority for our constitutional rights.

Progressives – from liberals all the way to communists – express a view of human nature at odds with human experience. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times misery and tyranny disprove their theories; they cling to them like Velcro.

The progressive worldview begins with the idea that we’re not created by and in the image of God; we’re the product of random developments during millions of years of evolution. Lucky that. Somehow, against all evidence, we’re innately good and only suffer problems like inequality because we lack a top-down system with brilliant managers to steer us toward human perfection.

As Karl Marx and his co-author Frederick Engels saw it, the revolution can advance only by doing away with religion, families and private property. Eventually, they wrote, the state would simply fade away and we would all share everything in common, from children to spouses. Seriously.

Engels, who, like Marx, was a first-rate cad, wrote glowingly of extra-marital sex as a liberating experience. The sexual revolution was part and parcel of socialist thought in the 19th Century, just as it’s a driving force in the Democratic Party today, which pushes LGBTQ sexual anarchy and abortion up to the moment of birth – and beyond.

A consistent feature of the revolution is that “the ends justify the means.” So, lies are as good as truth if they work. That’s why it’s not surprising that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez regularly emits whoppers.

Last August, she said that the “upper-middle class doesn’t exist anymore in America.” She grew up in upstate Yorktown Heights, New York, where homes have a median listing of $465,000.

“There’s no debate as to whether we should continue producing fossil fuels. There’s no debate.”

“When this country started, we were not a capitalist [nation], we did not operate on a capitalist economy.” That would be news to silversmith Paul Revere or Sam Adams, son of a merchant and brewer.

“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs…. people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.”

And then there’s her naivete. When asked about how to pay for “Medicare for All,” she said the question was “puzzling” and concluded, “You just pay for it.”

On February 15, she called President Trump’s proposed border wall “a moral abomination. I think it’s like the Berlin Wall [which kept people in, not out].”

Asked on PBS whether Democratic Socialism “calls for an end to capitalism,” Ocasio-Cortez said: “Ultimately, we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree.”

After driving Amazon out of New York, she tweeted victory over “corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world” [Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos].”

On February 24, she questioned whether people should “still have children.”